Work-Strain, Career Course and Research Integrity

Healthpartners Research Foundation, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Ensuring the integrity of scientific research has become an important national priority. Over the past 20 years, the structure, culture and nature of academic science have changed significantly, causing a number of value conflicts for today?s scientists. Increasingly, the values reflected in, and required by, the scientific workplace are at odds with the behavioral norms researchers acquired in their training. Many contemporary discussions of research integrity point to these new and unprecedented value conflicts as the driving factors in scientific misconduct. And yet, most proposals for ensuring research integrity tend to focus on "bad actors," individuals lacking adequate moral grounding, thereby suggesting a curricular response to ensure and maintain ethical conduct. We believe that deviations from scientific standards cannot be fully understood with exclusive reference to individual deficiencies, nor can they be adequately explained by looking solely at contextual factors. Our proposed research begins from the assumption - as yet unexplored in the research integrity literature - that the behavior of researchers, for good or ill, must be understood in terms of the interaction between structural constraints, organizational contexts and individual characteristics. The present research is designed to develop and test an explanation for unethical conduct among academic scientists that focuses primarily on work-strain. The concept of work-strain, derived from general strain theory, forces us to examine the moral actor in a social context: to consider the moral resources brought to the research setting and the influence of that setting on those resources. We hypothesize that work-strain leads to negative affect, creating differential pressure on scientists that, among other outcomes, may lead to questionable research practices. We test this and other hypotheses with data from a cross-sectional, anonymous survey administered to a random sample of 2,000 recent NIH-supported postdoctoral trainees and a similar random sample of 2,000 recent R01 supported scientists. Primary outcome measures include subscription to scientific norms and counternorms, adherence to these norms, and self-reported research behavior ranging from unintentional errors, through reckless or negligent behavior, to serious misconduct in terms of plagiarism and data fabrication or falsification.